


I Never Meant to be so Bad to You.

by deardracula



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-10-01
Updated: 2014-11-08
Packaged: 2017-12-28 02:35:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,841
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/986653
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deardracula/pseuds/deardracula
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When he was eighteen, he ran away. With an empty highway to his back, and a world of possibilities stretched out in front of him, Sam felt invincible. Everything had been going so perfectly before Dean stumbled back into his life, destruction and mayhem following at his heels like obedient dogs.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> title courtesy of Asia

When he was eighteen, he ran away. With an empty highway to his back, and a world of possibilities stretched out in front of him, Sam felt invincible. He was away from his family for the first time in his life, and it felt unbelievably good. He could finally breathe. The moment he stepped foot onto that bus in August, his life took a turn for the better. He had a backpack full of books on his shoulders, his knives tucked away instead of sitting heavily on his person. He had a clean slate to contaminate with a whole new set of bad decisions instead of living with regrets from a life he wished wasn't his.

He met a girl. A fucking beautiful girl that he loved and who loved him in return. She was soft and sweet and everything a boy should crave. She took his mind off his past, fixing whatever was broken in his head so he could sleep soundly through the night for once in his life. She smelled like fruit and something pink instead of blood and dirt and homemade booze, and that was good. It was right. She was right. She was everything Dean wasn't, and that was what he needed in order to wean himself off of the potent taste of his brother.

Wanting the sharp brush of facial hair between his thighs was not right, and he knew that. He always had. He knew that he shouldn't want his head slamming into the passenger door of the Impala. He knew that he shouldn't be biting his tongue during sex just because Dean's name filled his lungs like a cloud of toxic smoke.

Jess had goals and big plans and her future was bright, where Dean lived every second like he had a knife to his throat. He was a tangled knot of impulse and suicidal tendencies, the word regret never seeming to work its way into his vocabulary. Blood and whiskey and motor oil took place of his morning coffee, and even if he didn't mean for it to happen, he dragged everyone around him down with him, forcing them to drown in the hurricane he had stirred up for himself.

Everything had been going so perfectly before Dean stumbled back into his life, destruction and mayhem following at his heels like obedient dogs. It had been a storm of chaos the moment he stepped foot through the door. Dean was there, Jess was dead and his father was missing and the thought of ever finishing his degree was suddenly unreachable. He could either have Dean, or he could have a proper apple pie life like he so desperately wanted. There was no compromise, and the two mixed about as well as oil and water.

He regretted being on the road every second of every fourteen hour car ride. He hated eating meals out of vending machines and drinking nothing but cheap beer for weeks on end. He hated stitching up bloody lacerations with dental floss when he knew he could be doing so much more with his life. He hated the broken bones and the familiar tug of a trigger beneath his finger and the fake IDs. But most of all, he hated the way Dean looked at him like he knew he could break him.

He had promised himself a long time ago that whatever virus had plagued their minds wouldn't resurface once they got back on the road together. It had taken him three years to quit Dean, like a lifelong addict, and now that he was sitting less than a foot away from him in the front seat that held so many disturbing memories, he could feel himself getting the shakes. “Where do you feel like eating, Sammy?” Dean asked over the buzz of the Impala's speakers.

“Hmm?” Sam tore his eyes away from the blurred scenery outside.

“Food?”

“Oh.” He pressed the palms of his hands into his eyes. “I'm not hungry.” He propped his bare feet up on the dash, his tattered jeans splitting over his knees.

“You sure?” Dean looked away from the sea of brake lights their car was slowly parting, to glance at his brother's face. “You haven't eaten since lunch.”

“That's usually how it goes.” Sam's brow knit as he kept his eyes glued on the windshield.

There were a few moments of silence before broken words escaped Dean lips. "What's got your panties in a twist?" He knocked his fist against Sam's shoulder in a feeble attempt to lighten the mood.

"I don't know what you mean." Sam picked at the hole in the knee of his jeans, the headlights from the cars passing on the other side of the highway casting ghoulishly pale busts of light across their sullen faces.

"Horseshit, Sam." Dean pressed his palms into the cracking vinyl of the steering wheel. "You've been acting like a completely different person ever since I picked you up."

"Well maybe I've changed." He answered too quickly, his tone biting. The muscles in Dean's jaw jumped violently as the tape in the cassette player clicked loudly over the speakers, signaling the end of the recording. The air in the car was stagnant when neither boy went to turn over the tape, both waiting for the others hand to move first.

Sam couldn't remember the last time he and Dean had sat alone in silence for so long. There was always the wail of guitar riffs or the soothing explosion of firearms or the artificial moaning of a pornographic movie to fill the dead air that fell between them from time to time, but the way Dean kept his hands wrapped tightly around the wheel, forcing himself the leave the stereo alone was purposeful, Sam was sure of it. It was a malicious way of making sure they both felt the weight of the situation that had arose between them. It made Sam's skin feel tight and his hands feel impossible big and he was positive that he was going to explode if Dean didn't say something. Anything in the next few minutes.

The Impala crept forward, her frame rumbling idly beneath them. They were trapped by two lanes of bumper to bumper traffic on either side; the straight stretch of asphalt that continued on for miles in front of them was stained red with the daunting glow of brake lights. They had nowhere to run. Nowhere to escape from the pressing thoughts that ran wild between their ears. The fluids in the engine pumping loudly and the thick tempo from a rap song that spilled out of the windows of the car next to them wasn't enough to tear them away from the pressing task of trying to read the others mind like worn braille stamped into centuries old books.

Sam knew Dean wouldn't talk first. No, he was too hard headed for that. But he didn't trust himself long enough to scold his brother for making such a mundane thing like riding in a car so strenuous because he might say something he would regret. So they sat. And they waited for the traffic to crawl forward, the speakers still buzzing in anticipation.

Dean tapped his fingers along the skeletal steering wheel and Sam picked his nails down to bloody stubs. He caught Dean's mouth open several times out of the corner of his eye like his wanted to say something, anything to break the ear splitting silence, but each time he would press his lips together again into a tight seam because words had never been his forte.

So he broke first, and his voice split like a kid as he dropped his feet down so their rested on the carpeted floor, his hands sitting tucked away under the meat of his thighs. “So this is weird.” He kept his eyes on the Oklahoma licenses plate that had stayed in front of them for the past hour and a half.

Dean turned to look at him. Only the slightest movement of his head before he slammed his thumb down on the eject button and threw the tape that shot out into Sam's lap, replacing it with something with a heavy kick drum and guitar solos that could melt glass if cranked to the right volume. Sam took the battered plastic in his hands, the peeling red paint getting caught in the prints of his fingers as he turned it over, Dean's messy scrawl igniting fierce memories in the back of his skull. “Remember making this?” Sam waved the tape in the air, dried paint falling into his lap like November snow. Dean looked at him, a smirk catching at the corner of his mouth when his eyes fell to the tape.

“Nebraska, 1998.” He read his own writing out loud, something flitting across his eyes too fast for Sam to read. He snorted and set the tape down on the seat between them. “That's the year you learned how to shave.” Sam had turned his head away, thinking that his brother wouldn't say anything else out of spite, so he barely caught the words that broke past his brother's chapped lips. “The first time you made a friend.” He breathed a somber laugh as Sam watched his eyelids fluttering in time with his thoughts. “The first time you drove.” Sam smiled at the memories pouring off of Dean's tongue. “The first time you ran away.” Dean watched the road like it was the only thing he knew how to do. Like the wheel under the palms of his hands was the only thing keeping him from being dragged under the crust of the earth. “The first time we stood at eye level. The last time we stood at eye level.” Sam laughed with him, airy and relaxed. “The first time you kissed a girl. The first time-” He stopped himself. His teeth sinking into his bottom lip as his fingers flexed around the wheel.

“The first time what?” Sam pressed, his voice barely audible over the pounding of John Bonham's handy work.

Dean tore his eyes away from their lock on the highway to look into Sam's face defiantly. “The first time you kissed me.”

Sam's jaw clenched and he looked down at his hands that sat impassively in his lap. He thought they had an unspoken agreement, a document signed by open mouthed kisses at two in the morning and interlocking ankles while they slept, that ensured the sanctity of their unholy union of brothers that fucked in the dark. But now it was hanging in the air like a slack noose around his neck. The rope was rubbing the skin across his jugular raw and the horse below him was beginning to move away and he could taste his last breath clinging to the inside of his lungs as Dean looked at him with stone cold eyes, perfected by a life time of watching people die. He wasn't supposed to say it and he knew perfectly well that uttering those words was like breaking a commandment the moment Moses stumbled down the mountain and laid the tablets at his feet.

There was no going back. No denying any of it anymore. In some twisted, unrealistic way, Sam had always thought that if he never heard those words, he would be able to pretend none of it ever happened. He had kept his mouth shut for the sake of Dean's sanity, and he thought his brother was doing to same. “Dean.” His voice cracked miserably around his name in a feeble attempt to clear the air. Dean kept his jaw locked, eyes unseeing and blank.

“Just reminiscing, is all.” His knee jerked along to the beat of the drums, the seat beneath them pulsing like it were alive.

They had been talking fast and broken like strangers unsure of what the other would think if either of them spoke their mind. Sam’s skin felt impossibly tight, like he would be splitting at the seams in a matter of seconds. His hands shook and the muscles in his jaw wouldn’t unclench as Dean sang along to the cockrock blasting through the speakers purely out of spite. He tried rolling his window down but the windshield fogged and Dean fussed and god he hated the way the air felt between them. But this is what they did. They ignored it, let the problem eat away at them until one or both of them were severely sleep deprived and distracted and fucked up a hunt.

But Sam didn’t want that, it was unhealthy and fucking annoying and he couldn’t be locked in a car with someone who wouldn’t even look him in the goddamn face. Not again.

* * *

 

 It was some time until they spoke again, Sam finally letting the frustration that built up inside him over the past hour, rip through his chest as he punched the volume off and pulled the seat-belt behind his back, facing his brother with a knit brow. “I'm not doing this again. I, I can't, Dean. Do you know how fucked up it was? Can you even stop and think about how...how-”

“Yeah that's big talk, but where was all of that four years ago? I didn't hear you complaining then.”

“I've had time to think!” A car horn bellowed behind them as Dean cut over, trying to work his way into the lane that fed into the exit ramp. Sam pressed his fists into his temples.

“Why is it so wrong, Sammy?”

There was something in his tone, the way his voice broke or how he didn't raise it above a whisper in the jarring silence, that made Sam stomach drop. He visibly deflated, the shadows cast by the streetlights overhead moved across their bodies like a silent movie. “Because.”

“Because the world says we shouldn't? Well the world tells us we shouldn't do a lot of the things we do but you haven't let what anyone else says stop you from saving people.”

“Who is this going to save, Dean?”

“Me.”

Sam's lips fell into a firm line. He should have seen that coming. Years of combat training and fine tuning his senses, all wasted on a poorly phrased sentence. “Dean.” He rolled his head, the fact that his brother's name was the first thing that he thought to say rubbed him in the wrong way.

He wanted to fight this, and it seemed like the only logical thing to do. When he thought about the life he should want to have in ten, twenty, fifty years, it should have involved a yard with a fence and a row of hedges, a dog or two weaving between toddling two year olds. But that wasn't him. He was watching someone else's life unfold behind a fuzzed lens. He would never pay mortgages or get bills in the mail. Weather that was a blessing or a curse, he wasn't quite sure.

“Fine.” Sam jumped when Dean snapped, pulling into an empty motel parking lot. “We wont talk about it anymore. Consider it forgotten.” He killed the engine and stepped out into the glow of florescent blubs.

  


 

 


	2. Chapter 2

 If you’ve ever driven at three in the morning, you know that feeling. The feeling of complete isolation, yet total understanding of _something_. Sam didn’t really know what that something was, but he could feel it in his chest, and with every infrequent car that passed with carefully monitored speed, Sam felt a connected with the driver in some weird way that he hoped they recognized too.

Half of him hoped that Dean thought he had left again, just because sometimes watching his brother sweat gave him some sort of twisted satisfaction, but he knew that was the anger talking, not him. The other half however, hoped that he had taken Sam’s blunt signs and realized that he’d need some space for a while before he’d feel comfortable around Dean again.

Right on cue, his phone rang and he dug it out of the pocket of his jeans, keeping the wheel steady with his knees. The little screen on the front of his phone read “Dean” in pixelated letters. He let it ring as long as he could, just to make Dean nervous. “Hello?”

“Where the hell are you?”

Sam hesitated. “Out.”

“It’s three o’clock in the fucking morning.”

“I know Dean, I’m a big boy,” he snapped, partially regretting it when he was met by silence on the other end.

“Get my fucking car back here now Sam or I swear to god –” Sam snapped the phone shut. On the spot, he decided his plan would be to let as much gas evaporate into thin air as he could before returning it to his brother. It was passive aggressive and kind of bitchy, he knew that, but most of the time innocent jabs was all the pain he could ever inflict on Dean.     

When he pulled into the motel parking lot an hour later, Dean was standing in the window, his eyes deep in his dark sockets, his arms crossed over his chest. Sam took a deep breathe to brace himself before getting out of the car, knowing that if he sat there too long in defiance, Dean might do something hot headed.

The moment he walked through the door, he knew to brace himself, but he didn’t expect Dean to shove him up against the wall and punch an indentation into the drywall beside his head. Dean glared at him for a moment, his nostrils flaring, and his pupil’s deep explosions behind his lashes. His eyes fluttered shut for a moment before he took a step back. “You can borrow the fucking car, Sam. I’d just like to know where you are at four in the morning. You could have been dead in a ditch somewhere for all I knew.”

“What makes you think I can’t take care of myself? You’re not my keeper.” He didn’t know why he said it. Dean’s temper was obviously short but maybe some part of Sam wanted to start a fight, because yelling was better than an unbearably heavy silence. 

“I’m not going to lose you again within forty eight hours of us being on the road together,” Dean hissed, turning his back, his fists locked on his hips. “You can do whatever the fuck you want, Sam. I’d just like to be in on the plan.” Sam wanted to fight, he wanted a reason to punch his brother in the face but Dean obviously wasn’t in the mood. He almost said something else, but he could think of what, he couldn’t think of anything what would stab Dean deep enough. He didn’t know why he wanted to hurt him, maybe he was just mad at everything and need someone to be his whipping post. He knew Dean didn’t need that, certainly not right now, but anger was a hard emotion to control. “I have a lead on a hunt,” Dean said with a defeated sigh, sitting down on one of the beds. “A couple unexplained dead bodies down in Kansas.”

            Sam sat down next to him, peering over his shoulder at the computer screen. “This sounds familiar,” he hummed as he scrolled through the article. “Wait,” he picked the computer up off of Dean’s lap and typed something out with his middle fingers. “See,” he turned the screen towards Dean and watched his eyes drift over the bolded words at the top of the article.

“Who the fuck are the Bloody Benders?” Dean asked, squinting in suspicion.

“A family of serial killers from the early 1870s who owned an inn in Kansas.”

Dean sighed. “I was hoping this was going to be easy,” he rolling his head.

Sam silently agreed. One ghost they could handle, but a whole family of them? That could get a little messy. “Let’s get some sleep and hit the road in the morning.”

Ooo

            In the morning, they woke up, got dressed and ate breakfast without a word. It wasn’t until they were half way to Kansas did Sam realize that Dean was probably giving him the silent treatment. Sometimes the only way he knew how to act was like a child. Sam didn’t blame him, but it was annoying as hell. “So you’re not talking to me?” Dean glanced at him out of the corner of his eye, shifting his hands on the wheel. “I’m sorry about the car, alright?” And he was, even though his tone didn’t really convey sincerity. He had just needed a night to sleep on it to realize that it was out of line, that car was the only consistent thing in Dean’s life.

“I don’t even know you anymore Sam. Like, honestly, who are you?” That stung a bit, but he deserved it. But yeah, he had changed after having sometime away from his family and was finally able to breathe, really breathe and get some perspective. “If you hate me so much, if I leave such a bad taste in your mouth then fine, after we finish this hunt you can leave, I won’t try to find you again.” There it was, the words Sam had been looking for the night before; the perfect amount of syllables, the perfect sequence to form the knife he could feel being worked into his back.

            He could deal with violent Dean. He could deal with drunk Dean. Hell, he could deal with incestuous, brother-fucking Dean, but this Dean? This was uncharted territory. He didn’t know who the man beside him was and that fact that Sam had put him there himself, was a little heartbreaking.

His mind was racing. One minute he wanted to hurt Dean physically, the next he could feel his brother’s words cut through him like a knife. They had forgotten each other’s rhythms, each other’s beats, but they still remember where each other’s buttons were and exactly how to push them. What was so different between them, besides the sex? That couldn’t have been it, no way. Something as simple as sex? He knew it was a bond between two people in love, but he and Dean weren’t in love, maybe in a brotherly way sure, but not _actual_ love.

It was a long time before Dean said another word. Sam didn’t think he was mad, no it was something deeper than that. Anger was an easy emotion to feel, you didn’t have to have any sort of connection with your deeper self to feel anger. Sam couldn’t put a word to what he thought Dean was feeling, but he hated to think that he had been the cause of it.

“Sam,” he heard his brother bark.

Sam shook himself mentally. “What?”

“Damn it, was that our exit?” Dean shot a thumb over his shoulder and Sam spun around to look at the sign before studying the map spread out in his lap.

“Yeah, sorry, just take the next one,” he shook his head to himself.


End file.
